


Something Wicked This Way Comes

by narcolepticbadger



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/F, Femslash, Found Families, Gen, Halloween, In which Maze and Trixie get up to their usual mischief, and possibly (inadvertently) scar Linda for life, mentions of trauma and ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-27 11:43:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12581128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narcolepticbadger/pseuds/narcolepticbadger
Summary: “Let me get this straight, you want me to spend the best night of the year marathoning scary movies and raiding the little human’s candy haul so she doesn’t eat it all herself? Sounds like torture — of course I’m in.”Maze and Linda are charged with looking after Trixie on Halloween, and it’s all fun and games until someone gets murdered. (Allegedly.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soixantecroissants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soixantecroissants/gifts).



> Ask for Halloween fic and you shall receive.
> 
> Part 2 to be posted tomorrow, since what was a very simple Halloween prompt mutated into something of a monster.

Maze had always found it a bit endearing how humans awaited the turn of the season with such excitement, as if bundling themselves up in scarves (even in Los Angeles, where _cold_ and _autumn_ were decidedly charitable terms) and carving jagged faces into vegetables were rare and precious rites and not a well-worn groove in the cycling of their lives from year to year, marking a perfectly ordinary passage of time.

It never ceased to entertain her, watching those nonsensical rituals unfold, as predictable as the phases of the moon, when September began its creep into October. Everyone was suddenly bustling about with steaming drinks in hand and winding their clocks back and stomping through piles of fallen leaves with unabashed glee (if it were skulls, or the charred remains of some vanquished enemy she might understand their enthusiasm better), all of it inscrutable but charming in that soft-strange way people had, and kindling in Maze the same kind of amused affection humans tended to reserve for belovedly wayward pets.

Halloween was one thing — Halloween conjured within it a welcome sojourn back to Hell, familiar and freeing in the debauchery it encouraged all around: hounding strangers for sugary favors, playing at masquerades, embracing all things gory and horrific, if only for the brief period when the boundaries between worlds thinned and demons could walk the earth with their true faces laid bare. Maze had gravitated toward the holiday since the very beginning of her time here (Lucifer, too, relished the opportunity to wreak dark, earth-bound mischief for one night), but the finer points of the season had been lost on her, before.

Before she and the doctor found themselves treading, neck-deep, in the dizzying waters of that human anomaly known as a _relationship_ , hardly knowing how they had skipped straight over the shallows for the open sea and yet not at all surprised (no one had been, after all) to find that they were — always had been — a little more than just friends.

(Maybe a _lot_ more.)

They had liked each other from the start, to be sure, and there had always been an ease between them that had nothing to do with Lucifer or Amenadiel or the other, more amorphous forces at work that saw her turning up on Linda’s doorstep, on her couch, with increasing frequency. Maze had always assumed that some of her interest in Linda lay in the simple curiosity of drawing near a mortal with aims beyond inflicting torment or satisfying carnal appetites — it was something of an experiment, still, this attempt to carve out an existence of her own, complete with human feelings and a human job and human friends.

And here she was, with roots nudging themselves out in all directions and anchoring her firmly in place, a sensation that might have scared her into flight (not so long ago, it would have) if it didn’t taste so paradoxically like freedom. She had found a family, _chosen_ them, one she would give anything of herself to keep safe, but under the warmth of that realization lay a more troubling heat: the knowledge that the protectiveness she felt for Linda was different — deeper, somehow, and complex in a way that made her head ache to reckon with it — than what she felt for the other members of their tribe.

It was the restlessness flickering in the lines of her pulse when Linda came close enough to touch, and the sense that Linda, too, sometimes seemed to look at her with a certain careful consideration when she thought Maze’s attention was elsewhere, and how stubbornly these small awakenings resisted every name Maze tried to pin to them, even as they stirred something to half-life within her.

So: she and Linda were friends, and if that word felt wholly inadequate rolling over her tongue, she would explain the wrongness away by pointing to the English language’s peculiar insistence on inventing fifty synonyms to map the vagaries, the subtle degrees, of a single concept like _care_ when one term would do just as nicely.

She had been fresh off a bounty when whatever static building between them had finally sparked into true lightning, the charged air concentrating itself into a single sure strike that Maze hadn’t quite seen coming, for all she might have taken to watching the skies for rain.

The job had dragged her well off the grid into the wilderness surrounding Mt. Hood, and after days of digging pits for campfires and sleeping in the crooked arms of trees and resorting to full-on conversations with herself to break the intense quietude, she had been in rather desperate need of company, and a stiff drink, upon her return.

Linda had been the first to answer her call, sounding in need of a carefree night out herself, and they spent the evening talking lightly about nothing in particular and then laughing over Maze’s reenactment of the standoff she had had with two drug runners and an elk, skillfully represented by a pair of shot glasses and a snifter turned on its rim.

“Well, that’s a little more dismemberment than I prefer in my day job, but…” Linda tilted her head, her laughter fading into some softer contemplation as she looked, _really_ looked, at Maze, and saw something that made her eyes crinkle at the corners with fondness. “It’s good to see you so happy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Happy.” And she _was_ happy, but the words rang a bit hollow, even to Maze’s ear, as they came out, and she wished she had said nothing at all. Now they were going to have to talk about _feelings_ , and she barely knew how to do that on a good day, when she wasn’t grappling with the exhausting comedown, the adrenaline-drain, that always accompanied the end of a hunt.

Sure enough, Linda’s forehead pulled into a hint of a frown, and she toyed with a spare straw on the counter expectantly, giving Maze room to elaborate without her prompting. When it became clear Maze wasn’t planning to say anything else, she hazarded, gently, “That sounded like a loaded —”

“I missed this.”

Linda chuckled, gesturing to their relatively unremarkable surroundings. “What, slowly destroying our livers? Or just mine, I guess, since you don’t — I mean, you have a liver, of course, but you don’t need it the way we do. Wait, _do_ you have exactly the same anatomy, or — no, no, don’t answer that, actually.”

The doctor did have a tendency to ramble when she was nervous or inebriated, a quirk that had always made Maze feel stupidly affectionate, to catch Linda straying from some of her usually ingrained restraint and never know whether she wanted to listen until Linda’s thoughts spun themselves out or to shush her, laughingly, with a finger (with her own mouth) held against the woman’s lips.

Neither of them had drunk enough yet to be anything but just-past-sober, so she understood that Linda was offering her an out, letting Maze back away from having a weighty conversation, now, here, if she wasn’t ready to answer.

Maze nodded, intending to do just that, but then her face was too-warm and her hands were clenching against empty air and a rising bile of words was pushing its way up and out as she swallowed and — to her own ruination — mumbled, “Just… us.”

There must have been something in the way she said it, in the way she couldn’t quite look at Linda as they sat with that admission (whatever it _meant_ , feeling like everything and nothing at once) hanging between them but instead lowered all her attention to drawing a finger slowly through a line of water left on the bar, that had Linda suddenly closing the small distance between them and kissing her, one hand coming up to tangle in Maze’s hair as they leaned into each other for balance.

Maze kissed back at first, purely on reflex, before she registered what was happening, before the word _friend_ treacherously reasserted itself in her head, and she wrenched away with more force than necessary, stumbling gracelessly against the wood of the bar and reduced to slack-jawed gaping, speechless for one of the first times in her millennia-long existence.

Linda was straightening her glasses, looking flushed even in the low light of the club but otherwise remarkably composed for someone who had been all but shoved backwards in rejection a moment earlier. As the silence stretched awkwardly on, she half-reached out to Maze in a gesture of concern, as if fearing she had actually broken the demon, before thinking better of the action and letting her hand fall to rest at her side — safer territory — instead.

“Um. Sorry, did I just completely misread —?”

Maze, finding her voice again at last, interrupted before Linda could finish her sheepish question, before she could take anything back. “Don’t stop there.”

It was a stupid thing to say, given that Maze had been the one, inadvertently, to stop them in the first place, but Linda didn’t seem to notice, distracted as she was by Maze pressing, full-bodied, into her anew and letting her lips lay claim to Linda’s, to all the tender places she had been waiting to explore like this, skin-to-skin.

And kissing (feeling Linda respond in kind) was so, _so_ much better than talking, than struggling to put her want into words when simple contact communicated, a thousand times more effectively, that this, _this_ was everything Maze had been missing.

This was what made her burn brighter, the kind of incandescence that blinded; this was _happy_ without any hedged bets, without anything held back.

So, yes, there was something to be said for the less bloody-minded trappings of autumn, when the early-darkening skies and touch of chill in the air meant that humans became even more susceptible to cuddling and sought out warmth in other, intimate ways that Maze sometimes liked more than sex.

She hadn’t quite gotten used to the pull in her stomach, that all-too-real sensation of falling, (Decker had assured her, smiling perhaps a bit too widely, that such physical reactions were in fact a normal feelings-thing and not a sign of impending doom) whenever Linda came through the door looking windswept and attractively pink, or when she burrowed deeper into Maze’s side with sleepy contentment, or when she reached for Maze’s hands to heat them with her own, never remembering that Maze tended to run a few degrees warmer than the average person.

(“Forged from literal hellfire, remember?” she would smirk. “I’m like a space heater. With boobs.”)

In the week leading up to Halloween, Maze found herself spirited away on another job, this one looping her up to a series of backwater towns scattered around the Great Lakes, all seemingly stuck in some weird mashup of 1950s morality and 1980s fashion. Oddly enough, her mark ended up being the only person she encountered who spoke with the broad vowels and kitschy _don’tcha know_ s she had been expecting to hear everywhere thanks to her pre-hunt viewing (for research purposes) of _Fargo_. This was something of a disappointment, though Maze consoled herself by parroting the man’s accented outrage as she handcuffed him to the drawbar of a tractor.

(It was hardly a wood chipper, but it would do.)

She was kicking around the mid-sized warehouse that passed for an ‘international’ airport in these parts, thankful that she had at least landed a direct flight back to LAX, and slowed to examine a pitiful display of cotton cobwebs and plastic skeletons that had been strung up in one corner shop, in what she could only assume was the most extreme embodiment of _horror_ the Midwest could muster.

She was still sulking over the fact that she had missed out on dressing up with Trixie this year; she had been looking forward to walking around unmasked again, staring down a neighborhood full of rich people until they forked over the good stuff. There were _rules_ , apparently, about trick-or-treating being restricted to weekend afternoons, and Decker didn’t seem likely to approve of Maze and Trixie sneaking out for a little after-hours fun.

She pulled her phone out to inspect the set of snaps Chloe had sent the day before: Trixie stood in the kitchen, outfitted all in black save for two colorful corkscrews sitting like antlers atop her head and wearing her best _don’t-mess-with-me_ expressions, with one brilliant smile breaking out near the end. They had all been captioned with things that made Maze light up with a curious sort of pride, like “Trixie Espinoza: (intergalactic) bounty hunter” and “may have borrowed one of your whips” and “(please don’t tell me where it’s been I don’t wanna know).”

She was zooming in on the one labeled “she says she’s coming with you next time, partner” to try to see if Trixie had scored any full-size candy bars when Decker’s name flashed up on the screen.

“Well, well, speak of the Devil’s sweetheart,” Maze muttered with a grin before swiping to accept the call.

“Look, Maze, I know you’re just coming back from… wherever you’ve been and you’re probably dying for a night off, but,” Chloe rattled off, never pausing for so much as a ‘hello.’ She proceeded to explain that some vaguely-sinister-sounding crime spree was requiring all hands on deck at the precinct and that she needed someone to keep an eye on Trixie until she could beg off early the next morning.

“Let me get this straight, you want me to spend the best night of the year marathoning scary movies and raiding the little human’s candy haul so she doesn’t eat it all herself? Sounds like torture,” Maze deadpanned. “Of course I’m in.”

“God, you’re a lifesaver. How soon can you be back?”

They spent a few minutes dealing in details, and Chloe started in on her usual lecture about precisely what Trixie was and wasn’t allowed to watch, causing Maze to tune out halfway through and mutter, “Yeah, yeah, no severed limbs, I remember — I’m not _that_ bad of an influence, you know.”

She heard Chloe stifling an aggravated sigh on the other end of the line, and was pleasantly surprised when her next suggestion did not involve telling Maze just where to stick it. “Invite Linda over, make it a real girls’ night. She hasn’t seen you all week either.”

Maze rolled her eyes. “Thanks for that hot tip, _Mom_.” Chloe had taken a vested interest in her courtship with Linda (yes, the detective had even used _that_ word, though it could probably be traced back to Lucifer himself, the smug bastard), as if she couldn’t quite believe that Maze would know how to treat her girlfriend right. “I thought you always said our girls’-night-outs weren’t age-appropriate for Trixie?”

“That’s why I’m counting on Linda to keep it PG, for my sake.”

For all that the detective tacitly trusted Maze with her daughter, she didn’t pull any punches in hinting that she’d like an _actual_ adult, whatever that entailed, around to chaperone the pair of them and keep their mutual inclination toward mischief from spiraling into the kind of anarchy that led to (minor) acts of vandalism and arson and a permanent police record.

“I’m wounded, Decker.” She wasn't, really, and she probably would have asked Linda to come even without Chloe’s explicit approval, but she couldn’t resist teasing the woman, just a bit, in retaliation. “I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time I initiated Trixie into the tribe properly.”

“What does that — Maze, no! No blood pacts!” She listened just long enough to hear the rising note of maternal panic in Chloe’s voice, her smile sharp with satisfaction, before dropping the phone to her lap and hanging up on Chloe’s still-fading objections.

Her flight proved uneventful, though her new impatience to get back to Los Angeles spurred her to prowl up and down the aisles, into the galley reserved for the flight crew and their little packs of pretzels, until one attendant found the backbone to shoo her back into her seat (a few single-serving bottles of Absolut heavier, at least) and made sure she stayed there, belt clicked into place.

She settled for tapping out an erratic rhythm against the windowpane during the last hour, doing nothing to endear herself to the other passengers, and, when they finally touched down, elbowed her way to the front of the cabin and through the terminal with truly impressive speed.

She was _home_ , a concept that had taken on a pleasing weight for everything now held in its name: the walls of her room butting up against Trixie’s so that she could hear the girl quietly adventuring with Miss Alien when she was supposed to be in bed, and Linda fitting herself against Maze, curve to curve, and shared laughter, shared breaths — all of it connecting in a closeness that _filled_ her, made her know her own heart, and she couldn’t fathom how she had survived for so long outside of this impossibly gentle, irresistible hold.

Trixie launched herself at Maze’s legs as soon as the door swung open, and Maze just-managed to seize her and swoop her up into a hug before they both toppled over. “Hey, little human. I hear you got your bounty hunter’s license this weekend — any hot cases come in while I was gone?”

Trixie shook her head gravely. “Nothing yet.”

“Guess I’m gonna have to teach you the bounty hunting code now, huh?”

Trixie peeled herself away, eyes alight with the kind of marvel seen only in the very young, those who still harbored a hope in their ability to unlock all the mysteries of the world instead of breaking themselves against so many impassable keyholes. “There’s a code?”

“Of course there’s a code.” She gestured for Trixie to lean in closer, making a show of passing the information as if it were business of the utmost importance, and whispered, “You already know the secret handshake.”

“You mean..?” Trixie drew one thumb across her neck with the vicious motion Maze had taught her, and Maze nodded. “ _Cool_.”

“Come on, kid," she said, extending her hand and nudging her head toward the house, "show me what provisions we have to work with. We’re going to need our strength tonight.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Maze and Trixie were deeply engaged in a debate about the proper hierarchy of Halloween candy while Chloe quick-changed in the bedroom and rifled for her badge and keys in the kitchen, stopping her windmilling limbs only momentarily to rifle Trixie’s hair, too, with a “Not too late, little monkey” and a pointed look at Maze.

She flung open the door and nearly bowled over Linda, who startled backwards just in time to avoid collision, the hand that had been poised to knock against a surface that was no longer there dropping to her chest in alarm.

“Shit, sorry, come on in — I gotta run.”

Linda jerked her head down in a decisive nod, eyes still wide. “Yep, distinctly got that impression.”

“What’s Halloween without at least one life-flashing-before-your-eyes scare?” Maze said as she disentangled from her cross-legged sprawl on the floor, careful not to disturb any of the ranks of gummies and chocolates lining the room like so many rival armies.

She joined Linda in the doorway, hooking an arm around the smaller woman’s back and finding a familiar ridge of spine, the relief map she had come to learn so well, as she angled her head and let her eyes roam freely, touching over all the details she had _missed_ , even in the few days of her absence. Linda’s hair was soft and loose, the way Maze liked it best, and she had traded her customary heels for flats (that, matched with a pair of cuffed-up jeans, was about as casual as Linda could ever manage), meaning she had to stretch herself fully, reaching those extra inches, to catch Maze with a kiss.

The feel of Linda’s body rocking against hers, a slow press of breasts and fingertips, had Maze biting her lip to quiet every impulse firing in her blood, only-just-mindful that there was a child present, somewhere, that made all of this tactility very dangerous indeed.

“If you can reverse-psychology them into eating something other than chocolate tonight…” Chloe called out of the window of her car hopefully, rather ruining the moment.

Linda just snorted, resting back on her heels with a little sigh. “Yeah, don’t hold your breath.”

They waved goodbye to the detective as she backed out of the driveway, and Maze steered Linda inside, kicking the door shut behind them. “All right, settle a dispute for me and the munchkin. We could use your professional opinion on this.”  

“Oh? You and Trixie are debating… psychiatry?”

“Halloween candy.”

Trixie gestured helpfully to the battlelines sketched out on the floor. “We can’t agree on the top spot in our,” she stumbled a bit to wrap her tongue around the next word, “hierarchy. Which is better, Reese’s or Twix?”

“Reese’s, easy,” Linda said, earning a whoop of victory from Trixie, who crowned their rough pyramid with an orange wrapper and sprang up to high-five Linda.

“ _Seriously_?” Maze muttered, taking the betrayal to heart and wondering how they had so neatly conspired against her.

“I didn’t make the rules, Maze,” Linda said innocently, nudging her with a shoulder. “I just know the perfect ratio of peanut butter to chocolate when I see it.”

Trixie nudged her from the other side, smiling cheekily. “She has good taste.”

“Only in some things,” Maze grumbled, refusing to be won back so easily. But it was hard to hold onto her grudge, sandwiched as she was by two small humans who had a knack for charming the pants (sometimes literally) off of her, for making her heart beat with a fierce new resonance.

They continued sorting through the trove of candy, their conversation winding around the spooky music and occasional bray of a chainsaw coming from the TV. Maze ducked frequent looks over Trixie’s head to make sure they hadn’t accidentally stumbled across anything truly grotesque, but Trixie, to her credit, did not seem overly perturbed by the off-screen killings of a bunch of sorority sisters.

They were about to settle in for the night with a more stimulating run of horror movies — Trixie had liked the sound of _Carnival of Horrors: Welcome to the Freakshow_ , to which Linda turned to Maze and whispered, anxiously, “Are we sure this isn’t going to scar her for life?”

“I can still hear you, you know,” Trixie whispered back. “And I’m not a wussie.”

“Right, my mistake — don’t know why I thought an 8-year-old might be alarmed by the idea of evil fortune-tellers and, let’s see, a _carousel of death_.”

“I’ll let it go, this time,” the 8-year-old in question offered generously.

Movie watching, particularly when it involved all the terrors Linda had named, necessitated the building of a suitable couch fort to nestle in, Trixie decided, and so they set about assembling all of the blankets and pillows they could find until they had something just big enough for the three of them to crowd into.

Their negotiation of appropriately-thematic snacks was interrupted by a sudden, insistent pinging from Linda’s phone. She groaned and moved to take the call in another room.

“All work and no play, Linda…” Maze said ominously, shaking her head in warning. For all that humans liked to joke about it, the doctor really _was_ married to her job sometimes, fielding questions and patient referrals from her colleagues well beyond normal working hours.

“I know, I know, just let me see what —” she darted a glance down to the pulsing screen, “— ugh, _Parkinson_ needs, then I’m all yours, I swear.”

“You better be,” Maze called after her.

“Amateurs,” Trixie sighed, finally zeroing in on the murder spree playing out on the TV as they waited for their microwave popcorn to stop spitting tiny explosions of butter and salt into the side of the bag. She crinkled her nose in disgust as the latest hapless victim got herself trapped in the same room as the killer. “Why do they always run upstairs when the door’s right there?”

“People get stupid when they’re afraid,” Maze answered with a shrug, and thought _demons, too_ , remembering how she had shied away at first, fleeing into the pathetic excuse of ‘work’ herself when Linda had gotten caught in the crossfire between Lucifer and his mother, and the extent of Maze’s distress, her desire to _hurt_ anyone who so much as touched the doctor afterwards, had made her realize she held something more than normal friend-feelings for Linda.

(“Ah, the prodigal demon returns!” Lucifer had boomed, teasingly, when she slunk shamefaced back into Lux, before lowering his voice to mutter, a good deal more soberly, “Next time you decide to do a runner, let your housemates know before they put a missing persons bulletin out on you, yeah?”)

She refocused on Trixie, eying her curiously. “Anyway, that’s pretty big talk for someone with such little legs. What makes you so sure you would get away?”

“I can squeeze through tight spaces, like right through their hands. And I’m fast.” Trixie frowned, considering something. “You have to be quick to be a bounty hunter, right?”

“In more ways than one,” Maze agreed, tapping a finger to the side of her head and not-altogether-successfully stifling her amusement as Trixie mirrored the motion with utmost seriousness.

“So… this is like bounty hunter training?”

“You could say that. If you can outsmart someone like him,” Maze said, pointing to the hook-handed killer on screen, “and keep your cool in bad situations, you’ll be kicking criminal ass in no time.”

“How do you learn how to do that? How did _you_?”

“It’s always just kind of been my thing,” Maze hedged, hoping Trixie wouldn’t insist on a true answer. She couldn’t exactly explain that she had been created for the very purpose, that her skill for playing (and winning) cat-and-mouse gambits, for capture and interrogation, had been bred into her bones. “What, you want me to show you all my tactics?”

“Uh, duh! Bounty hunter’s code, remember? I want to learn _everything_.”

Maze grinned wickedly at the girl’s enthusiasm — having her own protégé was going to be fun. “Okay, little human, consider this your first lesson…”

She quickly defined the boundaries of the room, marking where _safety_ ended and _instant death_ began, and giving Trixie her mission: getting to the front door before Maze got her, without falling prey to any of the usual traps used to snare panicking humans in horror movies.

“Think of it as escaping from Mr. Hook-Hands up there,” Maze said, curling her own fingers into claws accordingly, “and show me all of this speed you were bragging about.”

On Maze’s shout of _Go!_ , all hell broke loose, as both she and Trixie unleashed an impressive series of screams (that turned, promptly, into a string of curses when Maze ran into the edge of the coffee table), lunging and pounding over the floor and managing to overturn a chair, then half the contents of the kitchen table, in their mad rushing around the house.

She had just gotten a hand on Trixie as they crossed back into the living room, cackling triumphantly, when the game slammed to an abrupt halt as Linda emerged from the hallway beside them with a warcry of her own and some sort of weapon raised above her shoulder, ready to strike.

They all staggered a bit in coming so suddenly face-to-face, their brains struggling to make sense of the scene, perhaps, and Maze saw that Linda was breathless too, her face pale and grimly resolute and slowly veering into shock as her mind worked through similar mental calculations.

She also had the time to think that Linda would cut a more formidable figure if her chosen means of defense hadn’t been a child’s umbrella, pink and undersized and entirely harmless, even when wielded like a bat.

“Don’t let anyone tell you you don’t know how to make an entrance, doc,” she panted, trying to break the tension while swinging a still-confused Trixie back down to the floor.

Linda hadn’t loosened her grip on the umbrella an inch, nor lowered it, and it took several strained attempts before she could wrestle her words together and force them out in one short, sharp burst. “I thought you were being _murdered!_ ”

“And they say chivalry is dead,” Trixie observed sagely, looking from Linda to Maze and back again.

Maze held up a hand in what she hoped was a calming gesture. “No one was murdering anyone —”

“ _Allegedly_ ,” Trixie broke in, causing both women to snap their heads around in question. She shrugged off their bewilderment. “That’s the word my mom uses whenever she talks about murder.”

Linda closed her eyes. “Okay, this is not helping —”

“No one was murdering anyone, allegedly or otherwise,” Maze repeated firmly, wondering how exactly she _was_ going to explain what she and Trixie had been doing to leave the room looking like… well, like a rather dramatic (if thankfully bloodless) crime scene.

“We were playing serial killers, and Maze _almost_ caught me.”

Linda let one hand fall from the umbrella to pinch the bridge of her nose, wearing an expression (one usually reserved for Lucifer and all the devilry that came with him) that said she couldn’t quite believe she was having this conversation.

“Right. Because playing ‘serial killers’ is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. Why wasn’t that my first guess?”  

Despite the doctor’s continued ability to keep her composure well past the point most people would fall to lunatic raving, there was a nigh-hysterical edge bleeding into her voice that made Maze worry she was better than halfway to sending her girlfriend toward a nervous breakdown.

She reached out and began gently coaxing the umbrella from Linda’s grasp with a “Why don’t we just put _this_ down, and…”, casting about desperately for something that would be comforting to a human in distress.

She looked to Trixie for help, and the girl mimed pouring something into a glass and drinking.

“…and I’ll make you some… _tea_?” Maze tried, disregarding the fact that the Decker household didn’t exactly keep a stock of tea on hand, and that she didn’t know what ‘making’ tea meant, precisely, and that Linda herself had once described the drink as ‘brown tree-water’ with revulsion.

Trixie smacked a hand against her forehead, vigorously shaking her head _no_ and this time pointing clearly to the part of the kitchen that housed the liquor cabinet. 

“No, I’m good,” Linda said wearily (but with more outward calm than before), as though all the fight had suddenly drained out of her.

Maze instinctually moved to her side, stroking a timid hand through the ends of Linda’s hair and tracing down the line of her back, relieved when Linda didn’t withdraw from her touch.

This near, she could feel the rabbit-quickness of Linda’s heart under her palm, the vestiges of adrenaline coursing through her system and leaving little shivers behind, and with this evidence of Linda’s fear, of just how primed for attack she had been, made so physical in her hand, Maze felt the weight of guilt settle over her like a sickness.

Linda would be the first to brush it off, she knew — to reassure Maze that she was _fine_ and that no one had done anything wrong. But Maze had seen the way Linda, in the months since her encounter with not-Charlotte Richards, would flush with vague embarrassment whenever she startled over what anyone else might consider laughably small things: a window knocking inwards against its frame where the wind had blown it free, Lucifer and Amenadiel’s shared talent for approaching silent-footed from behind, any patient arriving early (and unannounced) to her office while she was reading through the previous session’s case notes. 

Things had _changed_ when Linda had been made a target, not in any immense, easily-visible way, but enough that her body’s inclination to fight or flee now sat on a hair trigger, sometimes. And Maze had known that, and known _better_ than to think crying bloody murder on Halloween of all nights — when everyone’s perceptions of danger, and reality, were already a bit skewed — was a good idea.

(It went without saying that Chloe would be equally upset to witness what had transpired in her house, if for entirely different reasons.)

Still, this was hardly the time to get lost in her own musings, and so Maze masked her worry, letting her hand continue circling over Linda’s spine until she felt the muscles slowly relax. She smiled down at the doctor, unable to beat back the more lighthearted end of her wonderment any longer. “What were you planning on doing with the umbrella anyway, if I had been a murderer? Prod me into submission?”

“That, or whack you over the head and hope I hit something breakable.” The way Linda said it didn’t convince Maze that she was not still half-considering making good on her threat, though there was an undercurrent of wry humor stealing it’s way back into Linda’s expression that greatly eased the tension Maze herself had been holding taut in her spine.

“Are you sure you can even _reach_ my head?” Maze taunted gently, pleased when Linda’s eye narrowed with the affront she always bridled with when someone needled her about her height. Instead of swatting at her, however, Linda used Maze’s shoulder to lever herself up and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“I’d say I can manage just fine.”

Trixie had been watching their exchange silently, with an air of appraisal, as if she had been working to size Linda up this whole time.

“That was kind of badass,” she declared then, without preamble. “Most people would just run away, or call the police or something. But you were gonna take Mr. Hook-Hands _out_ , and you got in here, like, _way_ fast — you probably could have saved us too.”

“Yeah, you’re right, little human,” Maze said thoughtfully, grateful that Trixie seemed to know just what to say to dispel any lingering discomfort from the room. She turned to Linda again and squinted in mock suspicion. “Are you sure you weren’t a bounty hunter in a former life?”

“You’ll have to take that up with one of the higher powers.” Oh, _now_ Linda was lighting with a mischievousness of her own, glancing up at Maze with the kind of sly significance that made Maze’s insides clench with rising heat. “I don’t think I’m allowed to divulge that kind of information.”

“Even so, I think you just scored yourself an invitation into the people-who-would-definitely-survive-a-horror-movie club — we’ll work on the name later,” she amended, seeing Linda’s eyebrow quirk at the complexity of the title. “What say you, Trixie?”

Trixie nodded emphatically. “Oh yeah. We want you on our team. A doctor will _totally_ come in handy when the zombie apocalypse hits.”

“Oh, I’m not that kind of —” Linda started, for nowhere near the first time, but Trixie had already skipped away, aiming to retrieve the now-cold popcorn from the microwave and finally kickoff their movie marathon. “— doctor,” Linda finished with an exasperated sigh. “Why does no one ever listen to that; it’s a very important distinction! Also, _what_ zombie apocalypse?”

Defeated, she let Maze shepherd her into the blanket fort, where Trixie quickly joined them and claimed Maze’s other side. The opening credits of _Carnival of Horrors_ proved to be the perfect blend of creepy and corny, and Maze watched through half-lidded eyes, lulled by the way both Trixie and Linda unself-consciously curled into her during the eerier moments, the way Linda’s head so naturally came to rest in the crook between Maze’s neck and shoulder.

Trixie fell asleep before the plot moved much beyond its 'obviously-cursed-carnival-has-appeared-on-the-edge-of-town-overnight' premise, and Maze was about to suggest that she and Linda find something better to watch when Linda vehemently shushed her.

“Don’t even think about it. I want to see how long it takes them to realize Madame what’s-her-face is Janey’s mother.”

“What? I thought the unfortunate-looking boyfriend was the one getting revenge for whatever childhood trauma he keeps angsting about?”

“Nah, he just has a _really_ bad sense of timing. He’s an idiot, but he’s not evil. He’ll probably get himself — oh, there we go! Another body for the funhouse. That is _not_ how decapitation works, by the way.”

Linda’s running commentary on the events unfolding on screen — how she muttered about the ridiculousness of each death scene, and questioned the competence of everyone from the sheriff to the murderer and yet seemed thoroughly invested in the storyline — was rather more entertaining than the movie itself, Maze decided, and she soon fell to watching Linda, the play of light and adorable expressions of skepticism and puzzlement over her face, instead of the TV.  

“Why don’t Lucifer and Decker try to team up with you more often?” she asked after the killer’s reveal proved nearly all of Linda’s theories correct. “You could solve all of their cases in about five minutes, apparently.”

“Can’t say I’m interested in acquainting myself any further with the criminal element in this town,” Linda said, shifting a little against her side. “Besides, movies are all archetypal — real people tend to be a little more complicated to read than our walking Jehovah complex there.”

Well, _that_ Maze could wholeheartedly agree with. As soon as she thought she understood some new nuance to human behavior, to human emotions, one of her mortal friends went and did something to confound her all over again, one mystery opening into another until she felt hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of her own making.

Even tonight, she had been surprised, had discovered some low-lying turn in Linda’s usually well-mapped countenance that she had never fully seen before and worried at it, shuffling it back and forth in her mind until it reached her tongue, slipping out without warning like the topics designated _to-be-discussed-later_ (Maze’s soullessness, Linda’s unfounded conviction that she would go to Hell) always seemed to.

“Like, um, with what happened before,” Maze stumbled out. “I thought running recklessly toward danger was _my_ thing. You’re always so…”

“So what, exactly?”

And still, so often, Maze didn’t yet have the words, the grasp of certain human intricacies, that allowed her to say what she really meant, but she bore down and gambled, “I don’t know, sensible? _Adult_?”

Linda chuckled, sending an answering tremor to rumble pleasingly through Maze’s chest. She lifted her head to glance at Trixie, checking the girl was properly asleep, and then resettled against Maze’s shoulder so that they could look at each other without straining their eyes. “I’m not sure anyone else would describe everything I’ve done since I started fraternizing with the literal _Devil_ and his friends as ‘sensible.’”

The truth of it stung, no matter how lightly Linda had delivered the words — how much she _didn’t_ mean to summon memories of that day, the ones that Maze sometimes still woke to with a wild rushing in her ears — and Maze couldn’t stop her gaze from lowering, mercilessly leading her to the scars visible at the edge of Linda’s sleeve, and she wondered if she would ever stop feeling complicit in every opposite-of-sensible situation Linda had been drawn into because of her dealings with Lucifer and his hoard of (literal and figurative) demons.

Linda cupped a hand against Maze’s cheek, raising the demon’s eyes back to her own and studying her with a quiet fierceness that Maze burned under. “Maze, rational behavior tends to go out the window a bit when it comes to the people you care about.” She stroked a few strands of Maze’s hair back, exposing her wholly, and smiled in gentle understanding. “And that’s not something I’m going to apologize for.”

_The people you care about_ touched off a scattering of lightning through Maze’s veins, crackling to painful realization somewhere under her breastbone for all it said nothing, precisely, of _love_ in that profoundly human manner she hungered for. This — Linda’s hand branding a path against her skin, and the simple knowing stirred between them — seemed so much more intimate an answer to Maze’s constant, desperate need: that the depth of what she felt, of what she would endure in the name of, was matched absolutely by Linda, pang for pang.

“You know, I always suspected you’d be good in a fight. One of those scrappy types,” Maze said huskily, trying to distract the desire biting into her self-imposed stillness by returning to the safety of conversation. “I’d put money on you.”

“You _do_ remember that the last time a fight broke out in my general vicinity, my natural instinct was to hide under the bar and cheer the rest of you on from afar?”

“Yeah, and look at you now, wielding your tiny umbrella against all the Mr. Hook-Hands of the world. I’m so proud.”

“If Trixie weren’t here…” Linda muttered, eyes sparking with the implication of violence, as though she wished she had access to any weapon with greater clout than a pillow. As though she had a thing or two of her own to teach Maze about waging war. 

“Oh, if Trixie weren’t here, I’d be doing a good deal more with you on top of me than _talking_.”

As Maze detailed just what some of that good deal entailed, her nose buried in Linda’s hair as she whispered, she mused that Halloween truly _was_ a magical night, filled as it was with a thousand small witcheries and revelations — unmaskings — coursing alongside its darker portents as the moon cast its light over all the secret places this world liked to keep tucked out of sight.

And she resolved again to unravel Linda completely, in every meaning of the word; to not rest until she could refute the phrase _there are things you don’t know about me_ , until she had learned every internal lock on the doctor’s heart, on her soul, and gained entry by honest means, and to perhaps prove something of her own infernal heart in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, did this one grow in the telling.
> 
> Thanks to Nina for her patience and for requesting Halloween shenanigans involving Trixie in the first place, since Trixie turned out to be a complete delight to write for. Thanks also to Jay for being my sounding board about improbable household weapons, and to all of you reading this for being lovely and encouraging and for sticking with me during the wait. 
> 
> As always, I'd love to chat with you in the comments here or over at @loveexpelrevolt on tumblr.


End file.
